


Until exists the memory

by Ruta



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Character Death, F/M, Post-Series, Speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-12
Updated: 2017-01-12
Packaged: 2018-09-17 02:24:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9299915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruta/pseuds/Ruta
Summary: "You came back."The voice behind his back isn’t a surprise, but a part of him - the one weak and foolish that he believed to have eradicated as a boy - has an inner wince when he turns up to meet the clear eyes of Molly Hooper. She watches him with a hint of reproach that even her calm expression doesn’t manage to soften.





	

 

There is no definitive separation until exists the memory.

 **Isabel Allende,** _Paula_

 

 

"You came back."

The voice behind his back isn’t a surprise, but a part of him - the one weak and foolish that he believed to have eradicated as a boy - has an inner wince when he turns up to meet the clear eyes of Molly Hooper. She watches him with a hint of reproach that even her calm expression doesn’t manage to soften.

Sherlock memorizes with an avid stare her appearance, fixed in the morgue in a moment of perfection like that of a painting. He moves like a predator, surrounds her, occupying her living space with the same condescension and arrogance that for years has been customary to their relationships. Nevertheless, there is an unusual note in the way she escapes from his presence, arbitrary in her complaints, in the fury that she emanates and that unfolds from her, noxious and sticky like poison.

Sherlock bends his head to one side and his gaze falls apart into a thousand cracks at the edges of the pragmatic mouth, at the eyes that linger as an imposition on her petite figure to _see_ and don’t _observe_. "I came back because I can."

Molly grins apologetically. The curtain of her loose and wavy hair hides from view the face that even the memory of the real cannot fade. _Indelible_. Molly Hooper is an indelible mark, he discovers himself intent to think. And how could it be otherwise?

"You shouldn’t be here."

She laid down her arms and yet... yet, Molly’s ceasefire is an empty victory. The resignation in her frowning face, the desolation imprinted in her sagged shoulders, the palpable sorrow are images too vivid for him to not feel an immediate resonance, a backlash from somewhere high in the chest, like the echo of an ancient symphony performed by third parties.

With a sigh that seems to deprive him of any excess of energy, he rests his forehead against hers. He feels her stiffen. The familiar smell of her skin - grape and formaldehyde - surrounds him with the same comfortable feeling that he has always perceived in Baker Street. A different life, a different man, in a story that no longer sees him as the protagonist and to which others have put an end for him. 

"Shouldn’t I?" He asks and with his fingers gently pulls a strand of hair behind her ear. 

"You know it's wrong," she whispers back, biting her lower lip. "What would say your brother if he found us?"

"Then it’s a lucky coincidence that Mycroft felt the need to confine his cumbersome presence in the room 110 on the third floor." 

His rogue smile is not enough to relent her. Molly moves away from him with an air of disbelief. "You _really_ have locked up your brother in the ward of the unsolved cases?" 

He rolls his eyes. "It is not a _ward_ ," he emphasizes petulantly. For God's sake! It is a very _small_ number of shelves with rare - ten, twenty, _fifty at most_ \- cases in which he found himself unable to find a logical explanation. To call it ward is a exaggeration of the facts.

Molly’s amused laugh repays him instantly of that brief interlude of irritation. "As you wish."

When she, still laughing, stretches on tiptoe to throw her arms around him, the sadness is a faraway spectrum. 

* * *

These are nothing more than crumbs. Yet any hungry man after a long fast would be able to be satiated with far less.

This is a lie. No person with a glimmer of intelligence would never accept such an argument. In the past, even for him would be so, but that time seems to fade into the languid lights of dusk, in the chiaroscuro that run joyfully on Molly Hooper face. A young face, unchanged, untouched by time and by its insidious lies.

Molly's hand slides into his with disarming ease. Her eyes seem to have welcomed the turbulent flow of thoughts that he is harboring and they are veined of sudden awareness."What day is it?"

Sherlock stares at their joined hands, resting on the window sill from which they are facing the back yard. The sun is setting, orange papering the walls of his childhood room, suffusing with melancholy the noises and the colors of the surrounding landscape: a summer afternoon, the barking of a dog and the shouting of a child that no longer exists.

"Sherlock, what day is today?"

The gentle insistence with which she is praying him is an old pain, a friendly one.

He clenches his teethes to avoid the memory she recalled, but every effort is useless. He remembers the screams and the subsequent quietness, the helplessness, the feeling of emptiness, the abyss of a loss that, no matter how many years have elapsed since it happened, remains unbridgeable.

The tears that Molly is crying are his own. She is a part of him, the better, therefore observe her is like observe a part of himself, is like contemplate himself in the reflection of a mirror.

"Today is the day that you died." _It’s the day when I lost you._

"Tell me," she says, touching his cheek. "Help me to remember."

He would prefer to not meet her request, to get away, but leaving now would be tantamount to deprive himself of her company, putting an end to a contact from which, no matter whether it is true or not, he is not yet ready to break free. He lingers in the fictional heat of her hand, in the proud and fierce love he sees in her face.

"Why are you here?"

_What a question. Is not obvious why?_

"I'm here because I cannot forget."

"Forget what?"

_That it's all his fault. Forget his own stupidity, his arrogance, his blatant blindness. Forget her._

With the fingertips he caresses the subtle curve of her wrist, welcomes with relief the frantic beat of blood in the veins. Even here, where everything is still to crystallized memories, where everything and everyone doesn’t suffer the inevitable changes or deterioration of the case, his mind cannot conceive the idea that she is not alive. Every breath is a confirmation. 

"How did I die?"

"My mistake."

"No, Sherlock." Her impatience is evident. " _How_?"

"Because I was weak."

Molly snorts. "I didn’t ask why, but how and even if it had been the question, I doubt that would be the right answer." Her eyebrows collide in an adamant frown. She wants the truth. She will not accept anything else.

"A gunshot." His voice is not curt or devoid of intonation, on the contrary it is vibrating with anger and resentment.

"Only one?"

"On the back of the head," he explains and with the thumb shows her the exact spot where the bullet pierced the skin. He doesn’t tell her of the small pool of blood that had smeared the hair and the collar of her lab coat, the light off in her wide open orbits, static on the ceiling. It isn’t necessary because Molly already knows all this, these are details that she has learned from the faces of her patients hundreds of times.

"He must have good aim, then."

The joke hasn’t the desired effect.

"At close range anyone has a good shot."

Molly's smile cannot be harmed by his lack of reaction. Her joy has something wrong and yet makes perfect sense. Why should she be afraid? When death has exercised a power of any kind on her? It generated curiosity, interest, sadness, but never bitterness or anguish. Only once, in a case like no other.

"When did it happen? How long since then?"

Sherlock takes refuge in silence as if it were his trench, obstinate.

"Answer the question, Sherlock."

"Who cares?"

"All that matters," it’s her answer.

Why lie? For what? "Ten years."

"Ten years," she repeats in a shocked whisper, putting a hand over her heart. Her face expresses a thousand emotions and their weight crumples it as a piece of paper that is burning. The sunset has reached its darkest hues, is a blood and thunder play; a light breeze moves the white curtains inward, raises the drawing sketches scattered on the desk.

Molly is hugging her torso as if the wind blowing against her is full of snow and not of the broil of the dying day. A time-scale that seems eternal passes before she speaks again to him. "You lied."

He frowns. "I didn’t."

Molly gives him a smile of pure despair. "You said you're here because you cannot forget, but it isn’t true. You're here because you've already done, you've already forgotten. I'm dead. I'm dead, Sherlock and there is nothing that can bring me back. I'm not real. I'm just -"

"A memory," he interrupts her, fully understanding the meaning of her statements.

"No one lives only of memories." She puts her hands to the sides of his neck and scrutinizes him with an ineffable sweetness.

"One can, instead." _How do you think I survived until now?_ He bends forward to snatch a last kiss in a room invaded by the scents of the impending evening, by the chirping of cicadas, by the child's laughter that he once was, by the reminiscences of a time when he didn’t know anything else apart from the unconscious bliss and thoughtlessness of a state of rare grace: pure happiness, perfect.

Where else he could carry her if not there, to share those moments?

When he opens his eyes, he is in a empty and lonely living room. The gaze he crosses into the mirror above the fireplace belongs to a grumpy old man with a secret. The secret, well guarded in the wreckage of the man of the past, is that as long he will defend the memory of what has been, a part of her will live, and in doing so also what remains of his heart.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this and I published it on my usual website (EFP) on December 26. Now, after two episodes, the disconcerting discovery of Eurus and the many theories about the fate of Molly, the horrible feeling that had prompted me to write it has become even more overbearing. I hope that this feeling remains the paranoia of a pessimist. I hope that Molly has the happy ending she deserves because I love her character regardless of her relationship with Sherlock, or rather precisely because of how it was handled in the course of the seasons. Molly is a character of paper and ink, but she has a pure soul, true to herself and that makes her unique and special in my eyes. Fingers crossed, I really beg for her safety. Hugs to everyone!


End file.
